Fundamentals of Digital Asset Optimization

Next year, marketers may see a move from traditional search engine marketing strategies to digital asset optimization initiatives, where companies look to extend their Internet presence significantly by integrating their Web site and domain names with their other online properties.

These will include things such as information pages, store pages, product pages, video files, blogs, press releases and more. Only a very small percentage of organizations are truly operating their Internet properties in the way search engines currently process information, and time is most certainly of the essence.

Why The Change
Search engines like Google have changed the way people do business, seek jobs, read the news, research projects and buy products. There are more than 10.5 billion searches in the U.S. each month, and organizations that intentionally work on compliance with engines like Google are well embedded within search engine result pages to receive a lion’s share of loyal visitors, including the revenue each visitor spends.

Brick and mortar stores are beginning to take the Web more seriously and are watching their online revenue increase above that of their aggregate in-store locations. Case in point – a single mid-sized company increased its search engine visitor revenue by $45 million in 2007 and is on track to exceed 100% growth in 2008. More importantly, this organization did it on a $75:1 revenue-to-spend ratio. There are many other similar organizations that have not done as well, largely due to a lack of understanding on how search engines work today.

Basically, the “Googles” of the world are robots, or bots for short, and capable of returning hundreds and thousands of relevant search results to millions of users simultaneously searching the Web. Bots are tasked with evaluating and rating relevancy related to user intention, and must determine the difference between a mustang horse vs. a mustang car, a fork in the road vs. a fork on the table, or soup stock vs. NASDAQ stock.

A bot like Google has very specific compliance issues to consider, and the difference in compliance versus non-compliance, or partial-compliance, can add up to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, new visitors and increased profits for mid-sized companies each year. Companies must look at how their Web site and other digital assets are in compliance with Google and other bots to make it rain new channel profits. This channel, commonly known as non-brand keyword – unpaid search is one of the best-kept secrets among a tight group of specialists who recognize and respect Google compliance.

The First Steps
Companies should get started by creating an inventory of their digital assets, and must consider such things as text, images, audio/video files, e-mail newsletter lists and communications on social media networks as well as industry forums. Offline properties such as catalogs should also be included.
After a thorough understanding of all digital assets is realized, organizations can look at how to integrate all assets together in order to attract search bots, reach more customers, drive more visitors to their Web site while increasing its authority. However, optimizing digital assets may not be as easy as it sounds because it requires superior leadership to direct and coordinate changes in many technical and editorial aspects of your Web site. This may sound daunting, but before companies can determine where they’re going, they must fully understand where they are. Such action separates those paying attention from those content with the status quo.

Paul J. Bruemmer ([email protected]) is director of search marketing at Red Door Interactive.